Spurs need collective effort to rebound

BOSTON — From his first stint in a Spurs uniform a decade ago, Stephen Jackson has been a player known to wear his emotions on his sleeve.

So when Manu Ginobili entered the Spurs’ dressing room at halftime of their 92-87 loss to the Los Angeles Clippers on Monday night and saw the downcast look on his locker mate’s face, he knew the news was not good.

Jackson will miss the next four to six weeks with a fractured pinkie on his right hand, suffered in the first quarter against the Clippers.

“It’s hard to swallow,” Ginobili said.

Tonight at Boston’s TD Garden, the Spurs (8-3) begin a six-game road swing, their longest non-February trek in the rodeo trip era. They do so with zero healthy small forwards available.

Jackson was making his second start in place of second-year swingman Kawhi Leonard, himself out for at least six more games with tendinitis in his left quadriceps.

Now, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is left to freelance a replacement for Leonard’s replacement.

“(Jackson) is an important piece of this team, especially with Kawhi out,” Ginobili said. “But we’re not the first team to ever suffer injuries. So we’ve just got to step up.”

The Spurs dealt for Leonard’s draft rights two Junes ago and acquired Jackson at last season’s trade deadline precisely to avoid the predicament they now face.

With a conveyor belt of bigger wings on tap — most notably Boston’s Paul Pierce tonight and Miami’s LeBron James at the close of the trip — the Spurs are about to find themselves often overmatched on the perimeter.

“We’re going to have to keep shuffling and see what we get out of it,” big man Tim Duncan said.

For the next several games, at least until Leonard returns, Popovich will be forced to strap together small-ball lineups with gaffer tape. Against the Celtics, he will likely slide the 6-foot-6 Danny Green to small forward and use the 6-4 Gary Neal at shooting guard, with no choice but to downsize along the wing.

Ginobili almost certainly will be in line for minutes at small forward with the second unit. To aid with depth, the Spurs also are expected to call up James Anderson, their No. 1 draft pick in 2010, from Rio Grande Valley of the Development League.

Even before Jackson went down, the Spurs were missing Leonard’s defensive prowess. The 21-year-old is the team’s top rebounding wing, averaging 5.4 per game, and was developing into a shut-down defender capable of hanging with the league’s elite scorers.

“We’d put him on whoever we think is the danger, even a point guard,” Popovich said. “He’s not Bruce Bowen yet, but he really sets a tone for us defensively.”

Though considerably older at 35, Jackson provided the Spurs with a reasonable facsimile of Leonard on the defensive end. Now that he is sidelined as well, the Spurs have little solution for the Case of the Incredibly Shrinking Small Forward.

The shrinkage effect is sure to be felt on the glass, where the Spurs were already the fifth-worst rebounding team in the NBA even before their two biggest wing players hit the injured list.

In the loss to the Clippers, the Spurs gave up 17 offensive rebounds and 20 second-chance points — including 10 during a tight fourth quarter.

“We’re going to have to have guys rebound their position,” Duncan said. “It’s on all of us. We know what we have to do. We know where we’re being hurt. Definitely the offensive glass is one of them.”

Tony Parker said it will be up to him and his fellow guards to chip in on the glass.

“We’re going to have to help out the bigs,” Parker said. “We can’t expect Timmy and DeJuan (Blair) to take every rebound. So everybody is going to have to make a concentrated effort to go to the boards.”

As it stands, the Spurs boarded their charter flight Tuesday two small forwards short of a full traveling party, a rugged road trip made even more daunting by the team’s swelling injury report.

“That’s hard,” Ginobili said. “It’s going to be a good test for us and, hopefully, we get enough wins, and we get better.”